Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [12]
“Where to, did she say?”
“No, sorry.” Meredith focused on Ellen belatedly, her gaze sharpening like a camera lens. “So how are you, now that Courtney is no longer?”
“Sad. How about you?”
“Terrible.” Meredith tsk-tsked like everybody’s favorite aunt. “You know, they say war is hell, but I’ve been in a war and I’ve been in a newsroom. To me, you pick your poison.”
Ellen smiled, grimly. Meredith had been a nurse in Vietnam, but she rarely mentioned it. “You have nothing to worry about. You’re an institution around here.”
“I hate it when people call me that. Institutions close at three o’clock.” Meredith mock-shuddered.
“They’ll never cut you, ever.”
“Brings me no joy. I feel like you do, that cutting one of us cuts us all. Courtney was a real sweetheart and a helluva reporter.” Meredith shook her head. “I heard how upset you are.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sarah said you took it hard.”
Ellen could barely hide her pique, and Meredith leaned over her keyboard, lowering her voice.
“She also mentioned that you blame Arthur. By the way, so do I. It’s corporate greed of the highest order.”
Ellen stiffened. Arthur Jaggisoon and his family owned the newspaper, and it was career suicide to bad-mouth him. In truth, she didn’t blame him for the layoffs at all. “She said that?”
“Yes.” Meredith’s phone rang, and she turned away. “Pardon me, I’ve been waiting for this call.”
“Sure.” Ellen went back to her desk, glancing around the newsroom. Sharon and Joey, on the phone, looked pointedly away, and she wondered if Sarah had been talking to them, too.
Ellen’s face burned as she sat down in her chair. Marcelo’s back was to her, so there were no more eye games, and she wasn’t in the mood anyway. On top of her computer keyboard sat a messy stack of printed notes with Sarah’s name at the top.
Ellen picked up the pages and thumbed through them, and they included a draft, research, and stats. She wanted to confront Sarah, but didn’t know her cell phone number. She reached for her coffee and took a cold sip. Her distracted gaze met Will’s on her screensaver, but his face morphed into Timothy Braverman’s.
She had to get her head back in the game. She rose, grabbed her purse, and got her coat.
Chapter Ten
Ellen sat in a lovely family room that had everything but the family. Susan Sulaman sipped water from a tumbler, curled up in a matching chintz couch opposite her, in jeans, a pink crew neck, and bare feet, a remarkably down-to-earth woman who looked oddly out of place in her own home. An Oriental rug covered a floor of resawn oak, and the couches faced each other in front of a colonial-era fireplace that had authentic cast-iron hooks and a swinging iron bracket inside. A perfect circle of cherrywood table held the latest magazines, a stack of oversized art books, and a tape recorder, running, now that the small talk was over.
“So you’ve heard nothing about the children at all?” Ellen asked.
“Nothing,” Susan answered quietly, raking fingers through thick brown hair that curved softly to her chin. Her pretty eyes were brown, but her crow’s-feet went deeper than they should for her age. Two lines had been etched in her forehead, over the bridge of a perfect nose. Susan Thoma Sulaman had been Miss Allegheny County when she became the trophy wife of her worst nightmare, multimillionaire builder Sam Sulaman.
“What have you done to find them?” Ellen asked.
“What haven’t I done?” Susan smiled weakly, a fleeting glimpse of a dazzling grin. “I hound the police and the FBI. I hired three private investigators. I posted on the missing kids sites on the web.”
“Like the ACMAC site?” Ellen was thinking of the white card.
“Of course, that’s the main one. Nobody’s turned up anything, scam artists, but no leads. I offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward. Real money.”
“Sure is.” Ellen thought of the Bravermans and the million-dollar reward.
“I’ll never forget the day he took them. It was October, a week before Halloween. Lynnie